Author: carin
party tip #1
Gather fun facts for use in the face of conversational lulls—guaranteed to get dialogue sizzling in no time. Write them on your arm, tuck them into a sock, don’t be a bore and, above all, don’t let impending awkward silence put a deadly damper on things—
By way of illustrating this system in action I’ve listed a few possibly familiar examples of tete a tetes going nowhere—notice how an injection of useless but seasonally appropriate information can add sparkle, thereby saving the moment:
1) That looks delicious, thank you, but no, I don’t actually eat hummus, I suffer from gas issues…………………………… Uh, by the way, I just read where pumpkin flowers are edible. You wouldn’t have any of those around would you?
2) Nice to meet you, really nice, yes, lovely weather, I love rain……………………………… Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this, but Antartica—apparently—is the only continent hostile to pumpkin cultivation. And that’s almost a direct quote from the Internet. Is that amazing or what??
3) Yes, yes, great party. Really good, really good……………………….. So, did you know pumpkins were related to cucumbers?
4) Beautiful place, cosy. Mmmm, yes, yes, nice chair……………………………….. Oh, I just remembered! You won’t believe this—pumpkins, it seems, heal snake bites. Can you even believe that? No I don’t know what kind of snakes are included. Does it really matter? And what do you mean how likely are you to be in the vicinity of a poisonous snake and a pumpkin at the same time not to mention a knife to carve the pumpkin open with—because that isn’t the point. You’ve missed the whole frigging point. The point is it’s an interesting bit of trivia for god’s sake. Oh never mind. No really, forget it. It doesn’t matter. Could you just pass the pumpkin flowers please?
Happy Hallowing.
~
goats are (were) one of my dreams
From the new glossy pages of The Globe and Mail (Sue Riedl’s ‘The Spread’) comes a piece about a family that moved from Israel to Kelowna and opened a goat cheese business named after their two daughters. I read it thinking: that is exactly what I’ve always wanted to do, despite not having the requisite two daughters.
I just like goats. And not only that—although I do have a story about taking one for a walk in the Austrian alps when I was nine (that got away from me because it was not used to being taken for walks by strange young Canadians and was both confused and frightened and so galloped through the village with me in hot pursuit trying to think how to say Stop Little Goat! in german)—
—but I also happen to like goat cheese.
So running a goat cheese business has always been something that seemed right up my street.
Two problems continue to prevent this:
1) They don’t allow goats on my street; at least I’ve rarely seen any, and
2) I haven’t finished the novel so don’t really have time to be milking and walking and otherwise entertaining them.
Oh, wait. There’s three.
3) Despite my general crazy love for cheese, and no matter how hard I’d be willing to try, I just know I’d never be able to describe it in these terms (from The G&M):
“Misty and Moonlight are two cheeses that stand out from the pack…. Misty is immediately distinctive with its dark ash rind made from kiln-charred root vegetables. The cheese has a mushroomy, yeasty aroma and a nice balance of flavour–salty with a soft tang that leaves a pleasantly long linger. “
The other—Moonlight—is, apparently, “smooth and creamy on the palate with mineral notes and a pleasant earthy aroma.”
Gorgeous, yes, but I’ve only just learned to describe wine as not merely tasting ‘grapey’. Now it seems it’s not enough to describe cheese as mmmm, nice…
So, notwithstanding my love of all things goatish, I’ve gotta say this is one dream I just may have to let go of.
Ah well. I’ll always have the alps.
~
alien pods as farmers’ almanac, or worse?
In case you’re thinking of adopting one any time soon, here’s a peek into Life with Wisteria—
Blooms in May and looks like this.
When the flowers are gone the vine greens up into a thick canopy, keeping the patio cool and shaded and even sit-underable for a while during a gentle rain until the drips finally manage a way through.
Ours is either Chinese or Japanese. One variety twines clockwise, the other counter clock. I can’t remember which is what, nor can I remember which way ours turns. Nor do I much care I guess, else I would have figured this out (uh, google maybe?) sometime in the fifteen or so years since we planted the thing.
In early summer you get a few seed pods. Two, maybe three. You hardly notice them until autumn when they hang down through the by then de-leafed vines like fat string beans. We’ve never had more than three.
Until this year.
And that’s only half the trellis.
I must say, en masse they look less like innocuous string beans and more like alien pods with a plan.
From what little I understand of the universe, shrubs and trees put out extra seed when they sense stress of some kind, usually in the form of bad weather. (So what are they trying to tell me—I need more kindling?)
Okay. Thanks, I guess.
But may I ask what’s going to happen when these babies start falling? And when exactly will that be? While I’m outside with a cup of tea or sweeping or raking or shaking out a mat? While Peter’s on his way to the barbeque to innocently grill a winter hamburger or plank of salmon? And will it be all at once as an angry battery of hard, pointy pods, each with seven or eight hefty seeds inside that we’d have no chance against—none. Especially if we’re looking up at the time. Or will it be a cruel and strategic one time event…?
Because fall they do.
Talk about stress.
I mean—Should we get helmets?
~
places to find the moon
“I know where the moon lives now—
At the east end of the sky. Where the tip of Lake Superior meets the future.”
—from Factory Girl, by Jeanette Lynes
One Moon over One Magnolia
One Moon over More than One Spruce
(three?) Moon(s) over Goody Factory
Moon over Mendoza (five hours before earthquake)
Moon over Streetlight I
Moon over Streetlight II
Moon(Dancing) over Lonesome Windmill
Moon over (very) Distant Patio
(still-in-its-pj’s-and-clearly-startled-to-be-caught-so-early-in-the) Morning Moon
A few hours later…(more composed, fully dressed) Morning Moon
Good Night Moon
~
restaurant with a view
A happy culinary discovery on a recent trip to London, Ontario. (I had the gnocchi and autumn veggie salad, mmm)
Some people like a view of the kitchen when dining.
I prefer this.
~
pocalogging to my own tune
I think I’ve invented a word.
Pocalog: stands for POst CArd LOG. Similar but different from the original and ubiquitous WeB LOG—my version involves postcards, stamps, moving feet and letterboxes.
Also different from ‘writing postcards’, traditionally done on sunny foreign patios or beaches but can be (and is by me) done anywhere; I’ve got a lovely little stash of postcards, picking them up wherever, from flea markets to art galleries to cheesy souvenir shops and sending them out willy nilly to friends near and far all year round, almost always for no good reason— sometimes with nothing more than a brownie recipe scribbled on the back.
But I digress.
I was meant to be talking about another use for postcards, i.e. pocalogs. The idea being to send a postcard every day, or at regular intervals, just like writing a blog post. Only not endlessly, but for a designated period of time. I’ve only ever done it once—last year I sent a month of pocalogs to my niece, casual blurbs, sometimes with mini quizzes where she could win prizes, which she always won. (Google has made quizzes kind of pointless…)
So this year, because it went over so well and it seems to want to become a tradition (albeit reserved only for her), I’m doing her a pocalog of 31 ‘postcard’ stories for her birthday (plus a *donkey).
God bless technology but at the end of the day it’s such lovely nonsense that makes my world go round.
That and chocolate.
‘Stanley’s Shoes’
Stanley the alligator lived in a Florida swamp next to a house inside which lived a mean and miserable, crusty old Florida man of at least thirty-five, whose goal in life was to shoot Stanley and make a pair of shoes with his hide. But one day in his mean and crusty exuberance the man fell into the swamp with his mean and trusty rifle.
Sometime afterwards the other alligators in Stanley’s swamp said, Hey, Stanley, are those new shoes you’re wearing?
Heavens no, Stanley replied. Why, they’re at least thirty-five years old.
~
*Just to be clear, not a donkey for the garden (although I understand they make excellent watch dogs) but a sponsored one from The Donkey Sanctuary that she can visit. Her mother will be relieved.
~
today’s colour
Here’s what I know: just when you think the thing you’re looking for doesn’t exist—that the world has turned to golds and reds, is more than tinged with madness and cruely—if you really want to find it, you will; in fact you’ll find there’s all sorts of it about. I’m pretty sure this works for everything. Including goodness. That despite appearances, it’s there all around us. We just have to really want to find it…
~
a runcible fruit
The quince crop this year is just enough to fill the house with bowls of fragrance (gorgeous fresh scent for weeks as they ripen); not enough to make jam. Which makes me very happy.
I’m not in a jam-making mood.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
—from The Owl and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear
~
the reason i like keeping old notebooks
Well, there are several reasons. Not the least of which is that I can open one willy nilly from the dusty pile under my desk whenever I like and find odd things written inside that alternate
between (only to me) mind bendingly brilliant, to (only to me) amusing bon mots, to… what the?
I posted an example of the latter on my ‘other’ blog recently. No flipping clue what any of it meant. But it did amuse me and could very well be brilliant.
Or… ahem…uh, not.
The thing is even if there’s no apparent purpose, if all those words from all those years ago amount to meaningless dreck, so be it. The fact is that they were written, jotted, recorded with intention. There was a message, an impression to share. And maybe it’s the sense of that ‘something’, more than the specific, that resonates. There’s pleasure and even welcome discomfort in stumbling across that kind of rawness in ourselves—like a piece of us that we choose to forget but that, at some level, still exists.
Not everyone feels this way. A friend of mine burns her notebooks at intervals, doesn’t want to be reminded of what she thought was important then. I understand wanting to avoid the cringe factor, but still, I think she’s missing something.
Anyway, after having that bouncing round my head for the past few days, this morning I opened a new old notebook and the first entry was this—a quote by Mr. Housman:
“The reason the words can have such a physical effect as to raise the hair on one’s neck is because these words are poetry, and find their way to something in us which is obscure and latent, something older than the present organization of our nature.”
Not that it has anything to do with notebooks. But to which I still say yeah.
~
Matilda Magtree 
